One of the effects of the proliferation of specialized devices on the Internet (the Internet of Things, or IoT) is that keeping track of very large numbers of similar devices, distributed over a large geographic area and different versions of devices, is a non-trivial problem because these devices may need to be tracked and maintained for decades, even as the Internet infrastructure around them evolves. For example, a network of utility meters may be required to control millions of such devices. In another example, a network of fire alarm sensors comprising many millions of devices may be monitored by a single network service. In yet another example, each streetlight in a city can be controlled and monitored by means of an Internet service. These devices may be organized by the Internet service according to the DNS domains in which they are a) configured to register themselves or b) registered by some other process.
Historically, host names have been used to register Internet devices and map their network addresses using the world-wide, distributed network of Domain Name System (DNS) [RFC1034] servers. Internet devices can make use of this ubiquitous functionality by registering their identities with a DNS server under a zone that is predetermined for the service offered by the device. A typical device name can consist of a character string derived from unique attributes of the device, such as the network MAC address and the device serial number. However, the large number of hosts that can be registered to a single zone places a heavy processing burden on the individual DNS servers and negatively affects performance of the system, for example, by causing the server to take unacceptably long to boot up and start running. Furthermore, if the zone server fails, it can affect a very large number of devices, with possibly disastrous consequences depending on the implementation.
In order to be able to use the DNS for IoT devices, methods and systems are desirable to limit the size of each DNS zone and to spread the load over a number of different servers without compromising the ability to update and query for IoT devices by domain names.
Thus, needs exist for improved techniques of large DNS zone management.